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Era of the Normans
The Era of the Norman Conquests lasted from about 1014 AD until 1095 AD. It began after reign of King Ethelred the Unready of England, which ultimately resulted in England briefly becoming part of the wider Scandinavian Empire. It then ended with the start of the Crusades in 1095 AD. In the history of Europe, this period is considered the start of the High Middle Ages (1000-1300 AD). There was a sudden decline of Byzantine power and a rise of the Normans as a significant power in Europe. There was also the beginning of one of the major themes of the Middle Ages: the struggle for dominance between Church and state. It began with a clash with the most powerful of the secular rulers; the Holy Roman Empire. Meanwhile, the Turkish Seljuk Sultanate came to power over the now fragmented Abbasid Muslim realm. We’ll also catchup on civilisation in China and India since the end of Classical Antiquity, and the emergence of civilisation in Japan. History Norman Conquest of England After defeat at the Battle of Maldon (991 AD), king Ethelred II (978-1013) agreed to pay an immense annual bribe of Danegeld to the Vikings. English historians later condemned the decision and gave him the notorious nickname Ethelred the Unready, but such payments had been practice for at least a century and even by Alfred the Great. Nevertheless, by 997 their raids began again, often using the ports of their cousins in Normandy to overwinter and sell their booty. Desperate to close the Norman ports to the Vikings, Ethelred agreed to marry Emma, the sister of the Duke Richard II of Normandy. However, this diplomatic triumph seems to have gone straight to Ethelred’s head, and he ordered the surprise massacre some of the many people of Viking descent still living in England; the St. Brice's Day Massacre (1002). The inevitable Viking response came in 1013 AD, when a Danish army under Sweyn Forkbeard invaded England. Resistance quickly collapsed, and within three years his son Cnut the Great (1016-1035 AD) was crowned king of England, within the wider Scandinavian Empire. To shore up his legitimacy, Cnut married Ethelred’s widow, Emma of Normandy, thus her son Edward became his stepson. Cnut ruled effectively in England, preserving the Anglo-Saxon nobility and encouraging intermarriage between Danes and the English. When Cnut died, he was first succeeded by his own two short-lived sons. Thus, the crown was eventually passed to his native Anglo-Saxon stepson, Edward the Confessor (1042-1066 AD). Edward had spent a quarter of a century living in exile in Normandy throughout Cnut's reign, and brought many Normans into his administration. However, he failured to produce an heir and would be the last in the line of Alfred the Great. His death brought about a succession crisis in England. On his deathbed, Edward declared that the crown would go to Harold Godwinson, the powerful and wealthy Earl of Wessex. However, two other powerful rulers had strong claims to the English throne: king Harald Hardrada of Norway based on an agreement with Cnut's sons to restore Scandinavian rule in England; and Duke William of Normandy the cousin of Edward through his great-aunt Emma of Normandy. William the Conqueror (1035-1087 AD) became Duke of Normandy at just eight years of age. Violence and plots plagued his early reign as the Norman nobles saw their chance to grab power. However after a great victory against rebels at the Battle of Val-ès-Dunes (1047), he gradually asserted his authority over the duchy and ruthlessly restored Normandy's power. He emerged from these trials as a formidable personality, a brilliant and often savage military commander, surrounded by young and talented knights and advisors. In 1063, he invaded and annexed the county of Maine to the south, but he already had in mind a yet greater prize. England was one of the biggest and most centralised states in Western Europe. In 1066, William of Normandy pressed his own claim to the English throne, as a cousin of Edward the Confessor. He also claimed that Harold Godwinson, while in Normandy to secure the release of his imprisoned brother, had sworn an oath on holy relics to support William’s claim to the crown. William immediately began preparing for an invasion of England, building 400 ships to carry 10,000 knights and horses. Across the Channel, king Harold Godwinson had deployed his army on the south coast, in readiness for William's attack. In September 1066 the invasion came, but not from the south. King Harald Hardrada of Norway invaded northern England, defeated the local earls, and captured York; the former Danish capital in England. Harold Godwinson marched north in just five days, and caught the Norwegian army by surprise, defeating Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. This battle is commonly used to mark the end of the Viking Age. Yet, the victory proved hollow. Just three days later, William of Normandy landed his own invasion force unopposed on the south coast, carrying the holy relics that Harold had supposedly sworn on in Normandy. Battle-weary, Harold Godwinson marched the exhausting 200 miles south to meet him at the Battle of Hastings (October 1066). On Saturday 14 October 1066, a single battle between less than 20,000 men permanently changed the course of English history. The English were lined up in a shield wall, the traditional way of fighting, tried and tested over the centuries. Confronting them was something startlingly new in English warfare; the Norman mounted knights. The battle lasts the entire day, with the cavalry charge eventually breaking the English line. Late in the afternoon, a chance arrow killed Harold Godwinson; according to the Bayeux Tapestry hitting him in the eye. The Normans met no more opposition on their march to Westminster Abbey in London, where William the Conqueror (1066-1087 AD) was crowned king of England and one of the most powerful rulers in 11th-century Western Europe. William secured his new kingdom with exemplary thoroughness. Within weeks the English landscape was being transformed by the construction of hundreds of wooden motte-and-bailey castle, unlike anything seen in England before. Traditional Anglo-Saxon fortifications were walled towns and villages to shelter the people from attack. Norman castles were compact military bases designed to defend the power of the new ruling class and intimidate the local community; a militarisation of England. Many would later be replaced by monumental towers of stone, such as the massive White Tower to defend his capital; now known as the heart of the Tower of London. The stiffest Anglo-Saxon resistance was in the north, centred in York. William decided to starve the rebels into submission, laying waste to the northern shires; the Harrying of the North (1069–70). The last Anglo-Saxon rebel, a guerilla fighter known as Hereward the Wake, and killed in 1072. By 1080, the Norman conquest of England was celebrated as a fait accompli by the commissioning of the magnificent Bayeux Tapestry. Good administration required efficient taxation and detailed information about the country, thus William commissioned his most famous work. The ''Domesday Book ''(1086), a vast census of the kingdom, colloquially named in allusion to the Day of Judgement because the commissioners’ findings were final. Domesday reveals the scale to which the Anglo-Saxon ruling class were almost entirely dispossessed, and replaced by French Norman nobles serving the king in a network of feudal obligations. The king and his family possessed about 20% of the land of England, 25% was in the hands of the Christian Church, 50% in the hands of Norman nobles, and leaving a bare 5% to the surviving Anglo-Saxon nobility. Some Anglo-Saxon nobles fled to Scotland, such as Margaret of Wessex who married the Scottish king, and worked to transform it into something strong enough to resist conquest from the south. Throughout his reign, to the English, William was considered a foreign tyrant. Seemingly the feeling was reciprocated, for on his death William left the favourite part of his realm to his eldest son as the Duke of Normandy, while the throne of England went to his younger son. Efficient administration of the country continued under William's two sons, William II and Henry I. His sons worked harder to smooth the differences between Anglo-Saxon and Norman societies. It was often harsh, but there was also a sense of fair dealing. A charter of liberties issued on the accession of Henry I (1100-1135) sought to bind the king to certain laws regarding the treatment of nobles, church officials, and individuals; it can be seen as a precursor of Magna Carta a century later. Nevertheless, royal authority was absolute, enforced through the system of king's judges sent round the country to hear cases; the circuit court judges. The Norman kings and their nobles conducted court in French, the use of which endured in England for centuries. Thousands of French words would eventually enter the Old English language, which is why modern English has so many different words for the same thing, such as royal from the French and king from the Old English, or amorous from the French and loving from the Old English. The Normans so thoroughly overwrote Anglo-Saxon culture that today Anglo-Saxon names like Egbert, Athelstan, Ethelred appear strange, while Norman names like William, Henry, and Richard seem quintessentially English. Gradually the cultural differences between Normans and Anglo-Saxons evaporated: in 911, when the Normans arrived in France, they were Vikings; in 1066, when they invaded England, they were Frenchmen; and in 1169 when they would invade Ireland they were Englishmen. William the Conquerors direct line only lasted his two sons, before England was thrown by a period of civil war known as The Anarchy. Meanwhile, the conquest of England had made Normandy one of the most powerful duchies in France, with the family both vassals of the French king and kings in their own rights, and laying the foundation of the Hundred Years’ War. Norman Conquest of Southern Italy Viewed on the map, Italy with Sicily at her toe, protected from mainland Europe by the Alps, and with access to the sea on all other sides, seems a natural location for a single kingdom; or the secure heart of an empire as it was in Roman time. Yet, its geographical position had had precisely the opposite effect. By the 9th century, Italy was a crowded hodgepodge of rival states: the north was part of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire; and the south was a mix of the remnants of Justinian's Byzantine holdings, minor Lombard duchies, and Muslim Sicily. There was only one fairly stable element; the papal state of Rome and Ravenna. The chaotic rivalries that prevailed for much of the 10th and early 11th centuries, fueled by religious fervor with the clash of Western and Eastern Christendom and Islam, had a profound effect on the region. It caused the more important cities in Italy to begin enclosing themselves in strong walls and to adopt an increasingly independent stance; notably Venice, Milan, Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Siena and many others. With the Islamic world and the Byzantine Empire both enjoying Golden Ages during the 10th and early 11th centuries trade flourished. They built great fleets both for their own protection and to support extensive trade networks across the Mediterranean, which would only increase with the Crusading Age and the decline of the Byzantines as rivals. By the 12th and 13th centuries, the Italian City States were some of the richest and most cosmopolitan cities in Europe, with a unique social and political structure that would spur the Renaissance from the 14th century. The volatile situation in Italy was also a golden opportunity for mercenaries, many of them Normans; the Duchy of Normandy had little to offer the ambitious younger son of a noble family. From the early 11th-century, Normans arrived in southern Italy in ever greater numbers to fight against the enemies of Roman Christianity, both the outright infidels of Muslim Sicily, and the Byzantine colonies who after the Great Schism were increasingly seen as Christian heretics. The success of the Normans in southern Italy are all the more extraordinary be being largely the work of the twelve sons of an impoverished Norman knight called Tancred de Hauteville. By 1046, the Normans had carved out a tiny independent county of Melfi. In 1053, the pope Leo IX led an army to drive off the Normans but was defeated. In the aftermath, the pope was held hostage until he acknowledged their claim on Melfi; the Normans' faith rarely got in the way of their driving ambition. The Normans went on to conquer town after town, until in 1071 they captured the last Byzantine stronghold, the city of Bari, bringing all of southern Italy under their control. The gruelling and brutal conquest of Muslim Sicily began in 1061 and lasted 25 years; the great city of Palermo fell in 1072; and the last Muslim stronghold of Syracuse capitulated in 1086. The Normans were practical rulers. In Sicily, they continued the Muslim practice of religious tolerance for all faiths, and kept in place their bureaucracy. The Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily unplanned and disorganised. Many territories were conquered independently as separate duchies and counties, and it was only later that a unified kingdom was brought together as a single kingdom under Roger II (1130-1154 AD), the grandson of Tancred of Hauteville. The cultural melting-pot of Sicily was crucial in the development of Western Europe. It produced such wonders as the Tabula Rogeriana ''(1154), the most accurate map of the world until the Age of Discovery, and containing such accounts as the caste system of India and rice cultivation in China. Her sophisticated administrative structure would be studies by rulers like the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who would go on to establish the first professional bureaucracy in Western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The example of what a few thousand Norman knights achieved in Sicily would be the secular driving force behind the Crusades. Imperial Germany and the Church In the early 11th-century, bishops of cities and abbots of monasteries were great landowners, and enormous feudal wealth and power was attached to these offices. More and more high ecclesiastical offices were the exclusive domain of the great feudal families. Bishoprics were openly bought and sold (known as simony), or even passed from father to son, with the lax enforcement of celibacy among the clergy. Furthermore their appointments became increasingly the purview of monarchs, especially in the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. Inevitably, the secular power invested in Church leaders led to a moral decline in the clergy. In reaction to this, the Holy Roman Emperor appointed a new archbishop of Rome, '''Pope Leo IX' (1049-1054 AD), the first of a series of great reforming popes. Leo was a man of immense reforming zeal, who spent barely six months of his five years as pontiff in Rome, instead moving from synod to synod, correcting local practices, punishing clerical impropriety, and checking on lay interference. He succeeded in imposing standard clerical practices and discipline throughout Western Christendom. The other dramatic event of Leo's papacy was the Great Schism of the Eastern and Western Christian Churches. The direct cause of the rift are convoluted and seemingly trivial. The Churches had been drifting apart for centuries. They had developing theological differences, prompted by the 6th and 7th century attempts in the east to accommodate their Monophysite minority, and the 8th and 9th century Iconoclastic Controversy. They also clashed over Rome's claim of primacy over all the five great bishoprics (Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria), often based on the Donation of Constantine; today recognised as one of the greatest forgeries in history. In simple terms, East and West facing different political realities, gradually evolving differently and allowing minor divergences to harden into irreconcilable discords. All that was needed was an archbishop in Rome and Constantinople with strong enough personalities to bring the Great Schism about. In 1054 AD, both archbishops mutually excommunicated the other, in effect establishing the distinct Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. Probably neither thought the schism would be permanent at the time, but the rift was ultimately sealed when the Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, and it remains to this day. For the reforming popes who followed Leo, the continued subordination of the Catholic Church to the Holy Roman Emperor was not their intention. Since the reign of Otto the Great (936-973), bishops and abbots in imperial Germany were appointed directly by the emperor as a means of asserting royal authority over the realm, and even popes were dismissed at will if not to their liking. In reforming Church practices and discipline, the papacy also became determined to assert its independence. The battle lines of the first medieval clash between Church and state were clearly drawn under Pope Nicholas II (1059-61). In 1059, at a synod in Rome, Nicholas reformed the election procedure, so that the choice of a new pope was restricted to a conclave of cardinals. Imperial influence was clearly his target, and in retaliation, the assembled bishops of Germany declared all the decrees of Nicholas null and void. The new aggressive stance of the Catholic Church was fully embodied in Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) whose power struggle with Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV (1056-1105 AD) triggered the Investiture Controversy '''(1076-1122). While far from an attractive person, Gregory was a pope of great personal and moral courage. At issue was who had the authority to appoint bishops and abbots in imperial Germany; the Pope or the Emperor. The appointment of high clergy was too valuable a right to be easily relinquished by any secular rulers; great feudal wealth and power was attached to these offices. A series of escalating decrees and threatening letters culminated in Henry IV appointing a new bishop of Milan, when another priest had already been chosen by the pope. In 1076 Gregory responded by excommunicating the emperor. Nobles across imperial Germany used this opportunity to rebel and build-up localised fiefdoms; the Great Saxon Revolt (1077-1088). In the end, Henry IV had no choice but to back down, and make a public and humiliating penance at Canossa, to have his excommunication revoked. Yet, the truce proved short-lived. In 1084, Henry marched on Rome and deposed Pope Gregory. In exile, Gregory appealed to the Normans of southern Italy to restore him to the papacy. Although the Normans drove the imperial army from Rome, they also sacked the city so violent that Gregory lost all credibility; he died in exile less than a year later. The Investiture Controversy continued for several decades, with occasional compromises made on both sides, until the Concordat of Worms (1122) finally brought the struggle to a close; Worms established a subtle distinction between the spiritual and secular element of high clerical appointments. Ultimately, the long struggle with the papacy damaged the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor, and in the coming centuries Germany would fragment into a tapestry of small states, with the emperor as little more than a figurehead. Germany would only become a politically integrated nation state in 1871, through the statesmanship of Otto von Bismarck. The aggressive stance of the papacy led to the more militant form of Christianity that would characterise Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, and reached its zenith in the Crusades. The Investiture Controversy was just the first of a series of clashes between Church and state, such as the turmoil in England over Thomas Becket in the 12th-century, and culminating in the struggle with King Philip IV of France in the 13th-century. The Spanish Reconquest The Christian kingdoms of northern Spain emerged from the Basques that had clung on against the early 8th-century Muslim conquest, and the small enclave around Barcelona established by Charlemagne in the late 8th-century. There were many tentative beginnings to the ''Reconquista''' (718-1492); the Christian reconquest of Spain. They nibbled away successfully whenever the Umayyad Caliphate (756-1031) was distracted by internal conflict, only for the territory to invariably be regained by the Muslims, often with the help of wild Moorish mercenaries. The blackest moment came in 998 when a great Arab conqueror took Barcelona, and even the great cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela. Then in 1031, the Moors rebelled against their masters and brought about the end of the Umayyads. During the anarchy that followed, the Christians made significant advances to the south, notably reconquering Toledo in 1085 AD, the old Visigoth capital. However, progress was essentially halted with the establishment of the Moorish Almoravid Sultanate (1091-1145). Only on the east coast were the Muslims significantly challenged in reasserting their control, by the buccaneer and popular folk-hero El Cid. During the many centuries of the Reconquista, Christian northern Spain was controlled by a frequently squabbling group of small kingdoms. However, the northern kingdoms were just as affected by the more aggressive form of Christianity as the rest of Europe in the 11th and 12th century, and by the late 12th century they would coalesce into larger states capable of confronting the Muslims again. Rise of the Muslim Seljuk Turks By the late 10th century, the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258) was characterised by regional powers, with most nominally loyal to the Sunni Caliph. and some such as Shi'a Fatimid Egypt openly hostile. At the same time, a new powerfully disruptive force was emerging in the east; the Turks. The Turks were the first wave of tribesmen to emerge from the high plateau of Mongolia, some time around the 6th-century. Unlike the sudden eruption of the Mongols in the 13th-century, the emergence of the Turks was a gradual and uncharted process. Renowned as mounted archers, the Turks are said to have fought as mercenaries for both the Muslims and Tang Chinese at the Battle of Talas (751), and in subsequent centuries were often recruited for frontier defences of the Muslim world. By the late 10th century, the Turks had converted to Islam, and carved out for themselves numerous petty kingdoms around the northern and eastern fringes of the Muslim world. One such kingdom founded in 997 was Ghazni (centred in modern day Afghanistan), which briefly built a huge dominion which stretched into India. By 1040, an aggressive new dynasty had emerged in Ghazni; the '''Seljuk Turks' (1037–1194). Under the extraordinary leadership of Tughril Beg, the Seljuk Turks fought their way through the chaos of rival petty-kingdoms in Persia, to the very gates of Baghdad. Sensing an opportunity to unite the Muslim world again, the Seljuks were essentially welcomed into Baghdad in 1055; the Abbasids retained the nominal overall rule of the Muslim world with the religious title of Caliph, while the Seljuks would govern the consolidated realm as Sultan. The Caliph gave the Seljuk Turks the ambitious task of crushing the Fatimids and bringing Egypt back into the fold. For now this was beyond the powers of the still somewhat unruly Turkish tribesmen, although some fighting did occur around Fatimids controlled Palestine, making it much more difficult for Christians to make their pilgrimages to Jerusalem. At the same time, the Seljuks extended their territory to include Armenia in 1068, the oft disputed border between the Byzantine and Muslim worlds. This act of aggression prompted a response from the Byzantine emperor, Romanus IV (1068-1071). Under the successors of Basil II, the administration of the empire had increasingly fallen into the hands of a poisonous imperial court and the machinations of powerful nobles. Meanwhile, the once formidable Byzantine army had been allowed to decay and become over-reliant on foreign mercenaries. The two armies met at the Battle of Manzikert (1071 AD). Although they outnumbered the Seljuks, the battle was a disaster for the Byzantines. Plagued by political infighting among the Byzantine generals, huge numbers of the mercenaries deserted. The core of the Byzantine army was cut to pieces by the nimble Seljuk cavalry, and the emperor himself was captured. Romanus IV was eventually released, but in the meantime his political opponents had exploited the situation in Constantinople. Although Manzikert was not a crushing military defeat, it ushering in two decades of political infighting over the Byzantine throne, that laid open all of Anatolia to the Turks, and began the drawn-out, final demise of the Byzantine Empire. By 1081, the Seljuks had expanded their rule over virtually all of Anatolia, almost as far as the Aegean Sea. However, upon the death of Suntan Malik-Shah I (1072-1092) the Seljuq Empire fell into chaos, as rival successors and regional governors carved up the empire and waged war against each other. Meanwhile in the Byzantine Empire, under one of the last brilliant emperors, Alexios I (1081-1118 AD), the political chaos had finally been brought to an end. With Anatolia now seeming vulnerable, Alexios was ready to go on the offensive, when a vast shambling army arrived in Constantinople; the First Crusaders. India during the Early Middle Ages The gradual collapse of the classical period Gupta Empire in the 6th century, was followed by centuries when many large and small Hindu kingdoms struggled against one another. The initial wave of Arab Muslim conquest had brought their armies by 712 to mouth of the Indus River in northwest India. However, separated by desert from the rest of the subcontinent, it proved a poor stepping stone for further conquest. Three centuries would pass before the disunited Hindu kingdoms of north India, faced the real thrust of Islam. During these unsettled centuries, the most extensive kingdom in northern India was the Gurjara-Pratihara Empire (775-1036). From their capital at Kannauj, they controlled a territory stretching across the north of the subcontinent, and were instrumental in containing Muslim armies. Expansion triggered the long 9th century power struggle known as the Tripartite Struggle, with the Pala Empire to the east and the Rashtrakuta Empire to the south. In the far south, the Tamil kingdom of the Cholas also reached an impressive extent in the 10th and 11th century, encompassing the whole of southern India including Sri Lanka. While very much focused on the south’s far-reaching trade, the Cholas also left behind some of the finest examples of Dravidian architecture, such as the sublime Brihadishwara and Nataraja temples. With the decline of the Gurjara-Pratihara Empire from the 10th century, there emerged in northwest India a clan calling themselves Rajput, who saw themselves as the descendants of the warrior caste of ancient India. Their fierce commitment to warfare and deeds of honour caused the Rajputs to fight constantly among themselves, causing chaos in northern India, and making the eventual Muslim incursions relatively easy. Yet it also meant that the Muslims would find it impossible to suppress the Rajputs, especially once they'd withdrawn to their desert fortresses of Rajasthan. The long-standing threat to India from Muslim invaders was renewed in the 10th century when an aggressive Turkish dynasty won power in Ghazni (southern Afghanistan). Ghazni gradually became one of the most glorious cities in Islamic world, funded by raids into north-west India for plunder and booty. By 1025, the raiding was undertaken in a mood of religious zeal, as much as for plunder. The profusion of sculpted Hindu gods and goddesses in India was well calculated to outrage any attentive reader of the Qur'an, with its prohibitions against idols and graven images. In early 1026, the the great pilgrimage temple to Shiva at Somnath in Gujarat was attacked and razed to the ground; it's said that 50,000 Hindus died in its defence. It was the first in a long series of sectarian outrages which have marred the 1000-year relationship between Muslims and Hindus. In 1040, Ghazni was seized by the Seljuq Turks who, distracted by carving out a great empire to the west, would bring India some respite. Yet Ghazni had established a foothold beyond the Khyber Pass, giving easy access to the rich north Indian plain for countless Muslim adventurers. From the end of the 12th-century, a series of Muslim Sultanates would gradually spread across northern India, culminating in the spectacular Mughal Empire. China during the Early Middle Ages The three and a half centuries of chaos that followed the collapse of the classical period Han Dynasty, was brought to an end by the short-lived Sui Dynasty (581-604). Under the founder Emperor Wen, first northern China was reunified, and then the south was conquered in 589. The Sui took many of the institutions that took shape during by the Han, and bought them to their fruition, including the government department system, the bureaucracy based on the imperial examinations, the government system of land distribution, and standardised coinage throughout the empire. His reign was a period of great prosperity and military power with campaign undertaken to pacify the borders. Wen was also an enthusiastic patron of Buddhism, and devoted much effort to building Buddhist stupas throughout the land, which developed into the distinctive Chinese style; the pagoda. His son undertook on an even more ambitious project. The Grand Canal linking the Yellow River and Yangtze River. Extended over the centuries, it remained the empire’s most important communication route between south and north until the late 19th century. Yet the project required so much forced labour, that it contributed to the end of the dynasty. During the rebellions that followed, one of the Sui generals seized power for himself, as the founder of the new Tang Dynasty (618-907). Under the Tang, China entered her most dynamic era. The capital Cháng’ān became the most impressive capital in the world, with a population of perhaps one million people, and its own foreign quarter, where merchants from as far away as Persia could be seen mingling with the locals. The vast imperial bureaucracy made possible the Chinese legal code, which has become a standard for the whole East Asian region, as well as creating the famous map of 801; a landmark in cartography that measures 10 by 11 yards, and charts the entire Tang Empire in great detail. The Tang era was a Golden Age of Chinese culture. Potters discovered the technique of the thin white translucent ware known as porcelain, or "fine china" in some English-speaking countries; in the early 18th century Europeans would go to great lengths to learn the manufacturing secrets. The poetry of the Tang is still regarded as some of China’s finest. The three greatest Tang poets were contemporaries in the early 8th century; Wang Wei, Li Po and Tu Fu. Chinese poetry was a social activity, with friends writing stanzas for each other as a competitive game at a party or picnic. The Wang Chieh Scroll (868), the oldest known hand-printed book was from the end of the Tang dynasty; the high standard of the printing suggests it must have had many predecessors. Under one of the few female emperors Wu Zetian (625–705), China reached her greatest extent, spreading well north of the Great Wall, and as far away as Bukhara and Samarkand (in modern day Uzbekistan) princes recognised her sovereignty. Expansion brought China into contact with an expansionist new power beyond the Himalayas; the Muslim world. A shattering defeat for the Chinese at the Battle of Talas (751) marked the end of Tang westward expansion, and drastically weakened the central imperial government. Seven years later the Arabs would again demonstrate their strength, travelling the Silk Road to loot and burn Canton, on the southern Chinese coast. At the same time, a frontier general took advantage of his command in northern China to make a bid for imperial power; the An Lushan Rebellion (755-763). Although he was defeated, the Tang’s control over China was destroyed forever. The next century and a half was characterised by a series of often violent struggles: between the eunuchs who ran the imperial palace and the regional governors; and between the Buddhists and older indigenous Daoists. Soon lawless provincial armies and popular unrest combined to make the country ungovernable. When the last Tang Emperor was usurped and killed in 903 AD, China descended into another chaotic fifty years of regional warlords, known as the Five Dynasties. By 979, one warlord, Emperor Taizu, had reunified central China under the Song Dynasty (960-1234). The Song was a smaller empire, coexisting with the tribal Liao and Western Xia to the north and west within the Great Wall. To assert his control over the empire, Taizu reduced the power of the regional military commanders and gave greater authority to the civilian bureaucracy. Though China was militarily weaker, the Golden Age that began under the Tang continued, and was in many way surpassed. The nepotism and corruption that had sometimes characterised the imperial bureaucracy under the Tang was firmly stamped out. The rich urban culture continued in the Song capital of Kaifeng, and spread to Soozhou, Hangzhou and Canton which all had populations of more than a million people. During the Song, cash crops and handicraft products became much more central to the Chinese economy, and a genuine China-wide market-economy emerged. The Chinese economy was so rich, that the Song issue the world's first paper money, in part because coinage could not be minted fast enough. While the Tang printed the earliest books, the Song printed a huge numbers of the Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist classics, although it remained a laborious process until the invention of movable type, pioneered in China but finally achieved in Korea in the 14th century. The first clock was invented, a thirty foot high hydro-mechanical tower. Gunpowder was also adapted to the battlefield with the evolution of the early flamethrower, grenade, firearm, land mine, and cannon. The Song were periodically troubled by their northern neighbours. In order to keep the Liao at bay, they paid regular tribute to their rivals, the Khitan, a tribe from Mongolia also settled in northern China. More drastically, the Song capital was captured in 1125 by an aggressive third group from the steppes, the Jurchen. Yet even this disaster proved only a dislocation, with the capital moving south to Hangzhou, where the Song continued for another century-and-a-half in territory reduced to a fraction of the former China. Civilised Chinese life would continued to thrive, until the dramatic arrival of yet another intruder; Kublai Khan of the Mongols. Japan until the Early Middle Ages Before there were historical records in Japan, it was a country divided up among numerous clans. The first clear political structure emerged during the 4th century AD, when the clan occupying the Yamato plain south of Osaka established sufficient ascendancy over the southern and central islands for its chieftains to be seen as Emperors with ill-defined supremacy; the Kofun Period (c. 250–538). The leaders of any clan, and above all the imperial dynasty, had more than a secular role. He had an important function in Japan's indigenous religion, Shinto; a version of the shamanism with a profusion of local spirits. During the 6th and 7th centuries, Buddhism and Confucianism had also spread from China. Under Prince Shotoku (594-622), the regent and de-facto ruler of Japan, Confucian bureaucracy too was introduced in an attempt to replace the more warlike rivalries of Japanese clan society, although the Japanese equivalent tended to promote more through inheritance than merit; a preference against which the Chinese tradition of examinations could make little headway. Until 710, the Japanese court had moved from town to town, but with the increasing weight of imperial bureaucracy a capital city was established at Nara; moved to Kyoto in 794. Both cities were closely modelled on the Tang capital at Xi'an; the fashion for all things Chinese was now at its peak. It also saw the first flowering of Japanese culture: written Japanese emerged adapted from the Chinese characters; and manual printing arrived in Japan via Korea around 750. By the 9th century, the emperors had become mere figureheads with the rise to dominance of the Fujiwara clan. In 877, they created for themselves the new office of Kampaku or chancellor. For two centuries, they reserved for their family the right to provide brides for the imperial house. With skilful manipulation, they dominated youthful emperors susceptible to control by Fujiwara mothers or wives, and then allowed them to retire early to a life of ease in a monastery; since their imperial duties mainly consisted of wearisome ritual, most were happy to do so. The other method for maintaining their power depended on the sophistication and elegance of court life which enticed nobles into the role of courtiers. This court life was brilliantly depicted in two of the greatest works of Japanese literature, both written by women; The Tale of Genji and the better known The Pillow Book. The rugged landscape and isolated valleys of Japan where local loyalties were strong always worked against centralised rule. Gradually local chieftains ally themselves with the leaders of one or other of two great clans, the Taira and the Minamoto. By the mid-12th century, there was full-scale war between the two groups, from which the Minamoto Shoguns would ascend to rulers of a militaristic Japan. Category:Historical Periods